Each month my goal is to read a minimum of five books on a variety of topics from different genres. Here are the books I read in January 2025. If you click on the title, you’ll go to the longer post on MORE TO COME. Enjoy.

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A Psalm for the Wild-Built (2021) by Becky Chambers takes place on a small moon called Panga, centuries after the Awakening at the end of the Factory Age, when the robots “employed” by humans decided they wanted to depart for the wilderness to observe “that which has no design.” They had long ago faded into myth and legend until Sibling Dex takes a turn off the paved road, heads into the wilderness, and meets Mosscap, a 7-foot tall, metal-plated, boxy-headed, wild-built robot who is on their own mission. This lovely story is for anyone who could use a break.

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In the Beginning was the Spirit: Science, Religion, and Indigenous Spirituality (2012) by Diarmuid O’Murchu takes a broad look at what many know as the third member of the Christian Trinity. In place of anthropocentric traditional approaches to Christianity which tend to place the spirit in a type of little brother relationship to the creator (God) and savior (Jesus), O’Murchu wants us to look at the creative act described in Genesis and recognize the Spirit as that which breathed over the formless void. The Spirit, in O’Murchu’s telling, “is the force behind the recurring words ‘Let there be . . .’”

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The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley (2024) by Marietje Schaake is an extraordinarily frightening and important new work on how the tech giants of Silicon Valley have become “too big to fail and thus too big to regulate, causing harm to all of us.” With a subject that is large and technically complex, Schaake has written a book that is both engaging and readable, even for the non-expert. Which is a good thing, because what she describes affects each one of us. The ultimate result of this coup is “the fundamental erosion of personal freedom and democratic norms” all for the benefit of American oligarchs.

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Troubled Waters: A Sea Story (2024) by Syd Stapleton is a tale about an environmental disaster and cover-up wrapped in a whodunit. Our hero, Frank Tomasini, is a 47-year-old marine surveyor who lives comfortably on the Molly B, a 1937 salmon troller, which has been lovingly refurbished by its former owner who also happens to be Frank’s best friend. Frank is asked to unofficially survey the damage to an abandoned and adrift boat that belongs to Arthur Middleton, a “rich and holier-than-thou environmental warrior.” It turns out very few people, including Arthur’s brother, a high-powered Seattle business shark, seem too eager for Frank to find out what happened. I discuss the work with Stapleton in my most recent Author Q&A.

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Jesus and the Disinherited (1949) by Howard Thurman is the work that inspired The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and countless other advocates for peace and justice. Rev. Otis Moss, III highlighted the uniqueness of Thurman’s book when he wrote, “No other publication in the twentieth century has upended antiquated theological notions, truncated political ideas, and socially constructed racial fallacies like Jesus and the Disinherited.” In this seminal work, Thurman stresses that Jesus “recognized fully that out of the heart are the issues of life and that no external force, however great and overwhelming, can at long last destroy a people if it does not first win that victory of the spirit against them.”

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What’s on the nightstand for February (subject to change at the whims of the reader)

• Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah by Charles King
• Death Strikes: The Emperor of Atlantis by Dave Maass and Patrick Lay
• Amsterdam’s Canal District: Origins, Evolution, and Future Prospects edited by Jan Nijman
• Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation by Bennett Parten
• Window Shopping with Helen Keller: Architecture and Disability in Modern Culture by David Serlin

Keep reading!

More to come…

DJB

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NOTE: Click to see the books I read in December of 2024 and to see the books I read in 2024. Also check out Ten tips for reading five books a month.

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Photo from Pixabay.